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Last Updated: November 1, 2009
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Interview with ONNIE WILSON

4,000 words

I think we have to create new ways of doing instead of perpetuating the male paradigm. We can't put women into the male structure and expect that they can change things from within. I think we have to take a different direction

I come from a very conservative background: that you must never speak about politics or religion was something often mentioned in our house.

My father brought home the Sun and we went to the sport pages at the back first. We never talked about political issues at all. The family voted Liberal, and my mother was convinced that you always had to remain private.

For example, the police were to be regarded as people you had nothing to do with at all. Even if you were burgled, you didn't report it, because you didn't want to get on anyone's records.

The same attitude prevailed at the conservative, private girls' school I went to. We stuck to rules and regulations - everybody conformed. We did the same thing, we looked the same, we acted the same and we dressed the same.

At university my early training was in education and that was conservative. I don't know what happened to me, but I always felt I didn't fit in. If anyone was doing something slightly out of step, I was most likely behind it, but I was still conservative. I wasn't exposed to anything that was a challenge in any way.

The first time I voted, I voted Liberal. This was at the time when we had the referendum to amend The Australian Constitution Act of 1900, so indigenous people could have Australian citizenship rights and be included in the national census. And I remember thinking "Why shouldn't they?" but it wasn't in my consciousness to wonder who these people were, or anything about them. I had no exposure to this information at all.

I taught for the three years while I was bonded by my studentship, then a group of girl friends resigned and we went traveling for four years.

I was out of Australia from 1969 to 1973, living pretty well like a gypsy , living in a little car, an ex Post Office, Morris Minor van from Scotland, and travelled through North Africa, Europe and across the unforgettable overland trek: Europe to Australia. It was a girl's true life adventure. That was when I started thinking differently and living differently.

My mother, in particular, had never regarded status or having a lot of money or possessions as important, so I had that at the back of my mind. I realized at that time, what was important in life was not consumerism or what you had, but about how people related to each other.

The experiences we had when we were traveling were not those of a tourist, trying to compare what we saw with what we had come from, as we were trying to be part of the community we were traveling through, trying to learn as much as we could about where we were. We didn't even take photographs - we didn't want to be seen to be voyeuristic outsiders. We wanted to be part of the communities we were with.

That experience changed me a lot. Those four years made a big impact - I don't think I have ever been the same since. I certainly never had ambitions to be a big consumer or seek out status or a big bank balance from that time on.

I developed the feeling that there needs to be one global community of people, and I felt I wanted to be part of actively sharing what we all have - this planet.

Part of the travel experience was recognizing how affluent we are and how other people, just by chance of birth, are in situations which are extremely difficult and where they don't have opportunities. They are disadvantaged, and this has nothing to do with their capacity or their skills, but just the fact they were born in that spot. I think gaining that understanding affected my life from that time onwards.

That is really how I see the globe and I think we have a responsibility to give back to those who haven't been fortunate enough to land in our shoes, not just to sit back and think we are the 'lucky country' and have a right to all that is in it. All my activism is with this in mind.

When we were in London at the end of the sixties there were feminist slogans all over the place. I remember saying to my friend "There must be something very strange happening here. Why are these women complaining that they are being hard done by?" I felt things they were objecting to were not happening to women in Australia. How naive and stupid was I?

Of course, we weren't around at the time when there was a lot of activism at home. We didn't see newspapers - we only had local news of wherever we were. We were learning in a different way - from the communities we were living in and the people we were meeting, rather than knowing what was happening globally, particularly around feminism.

I came back to Australia with no more insight about feminism than when I left. When I returned, I started working in teacher education in Ballarat, and when I went to a conference about women in sport, all feminist issues were being discussed.

I just thought "Yes! Now I get what this is about. This is it". Suddenly all the lights went on and the experience of 1,500 women together, a whole conference of women talking about women in sport and the disadvantage they were experiencing, (which I hadn't thought much about before) flowed over into other areas and I was changed forever.

So as well as my concern for all on the planet (not only the human species) I now had this overlay of feminism as well. Feminism became my passion, one manifestation along the continuation of the same thing -consideration for others and the whole species. But feminism is the most luminous spot on this continuum for me.

My feminism is that which promises to move all humankind in a different and more positive direction. I think women have the potential to change how the globe functions, how we respect each other and how we respect the planet.

'Liberal' feminism has had the most influence over the last 30 or so years and this has been great in giving women more independence and individual choice but has done little for communities as a whole, specifically the global community.

I think we have to create new ways of doing instead of perpetuating the male paradigm. We can't put women into the male structure and expect that they can change things from within. I think we have to take a different direction. The male structured institutions are so strong they socialize everybody who gets into them.

So, if you are a woman who goes into politics, the male political system, or the military system, for example, there is no way you can change what you have been trained to perpetuate.

The institutions within the male systems are well established, they use an extensive process of socialization for all who come in and women learn that if they don't take up the expected behaviours and attitudes, they will be forced to drop out just like the males.And women learn to act male, extremely well, often better than the males themselves. Maggie Thatcher was a champion.

But if we don't replace these institutions, we will be heading for the cliff edge. Too many behaviours are extremely destructive. If it comes to conflict and we use military might, nowadays that doesn't mean just hitting someone over the head with a club. Those hell bent on power and controlling others have become extremely efficient in how they can kill people: how they can annihilate people.

We can't keep going forward as a species perpetuating these legitimized acts violence which are so destructive. Human beings just won't survive. And acting to root out, the ever present 'enemy', compulsory in the male paradigm, is far from being civilised and socially disastrous.

If you look at environmental concerns, the way we are using and abusing our environment - well the environment is finite. We have to take a different direction, one which emphasises positive human interaction and care for the planet as a whole, rather than the present structure, which is one of domination, using and abusing, and environmental destruction.

Plundering the earth for profit can hardly be 'world's best practice'. We can't just go into a male structure and hope to reform it. It doesn't work.

Women straddle two ways of being and have had an 'other' experience, from our species herstory as well as our present history, of being concerned for other people: of nurturing rather than destroying. I think it is vital for us to lead, to take a new path to develop those capacities and shape new ways of living. Certainly the feminism that I adhere to is of that sort.

A good example of this is the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA). It is an amazing organization. It is an example of exactly how women can create a different paradigm.

RAWA is unique. Their model is something that could well be taken up in other societies for the better - for everybody's betterment - not just women's betterment, but for everybody's.

RAWA started in 1977. It started with one woman, Meena, who was on all accounts, very charismatic and visionary. She devoted her life to the pursuit of women's human rights in Afghanistan. This was at a time when championing feminist ideas was within a culture that was not just fifty years or a hundred years behind in such ways of thinking, as was feminism here in the 1970's, but centuries - light years behind.

But here was a woman speaking out, demanding that women be granted their human rights, knowing that the population as a whole would be better off if women had this recognition. She had a group of women who linked up with her to have this movement start and an extraordinary organization was born.

RAWA is strongly political but also active in assisting the most needy, especially women and children and runs many lifesaving programmes: health care, orphanages, small business programmes for widows and prostitutes and the like.

They support women, personally empowering them and leading them to become politically minded and active to bring about social change.

Education is a key part of RAWA. Their educational philosophy is not just about having everybody reach their potential, but about encouraging women to be politically minded, plus being concerned for others, and linking with others, and supporting others.

It is about including everybody - not having ethnic differences, financial background differences, but having everybody working together.

It is about respect and educates males to think differently about women and themselves. The revolution they want is through pen and paper - having women educated so they have the capacity to be able to bring about change in the community.

RAWA's leader, Meena was assassinated ten years after she started for being so politically outspoken. She was a threat: a threat to the fundamentalist/conservative elements, so they got rid of her. They would have presumed that this was going to be the end of these threatening, ratbag women but it worked in the opposite way.

Those who were working with RAWA just changed how they organized themselves and RAWA, the unique organisation, was developed.

They went underground and created an organisational structure that protected their security.

They abandoned the role of leader, and introduced a flatter and more widely distributed form of decision making with members working in semi-autonomous committees. This was done for security reasons, mainly, but it has been a useful way to empower more who are in the group and to give a greater number responsibility.

Within RAWA there are a lot of women who have had extremely traumatic experiences and who need a lot of emotional support, who are illiterate, who have had family members (particularly male family members) killed, so they don't have any capacity to earn an income.

These women are all taken in and supported. Everybody has a part within the organization, which is one where all teach and help those who are less able, and are then taught and helped by those who are more able.

Even if you send the organization an email, the response is warm, so even an outside stranger can notice the difference in how interaction takes place.The emotional attachment to the organisation is very strong as a consequence.

All members see themselves as 'RAWA', not individuals, and RAWA is the collective whole. The commitment the women in RAWA have to the organization is extraordinary.

RAWA is 2,000 strong at the moment. It has at least as many male supporters who are quite happy to go along with this group of women taking the lead. Some of them are husbands, some are fathers and brothers or other relatives, some are friends.

They also risk their life in being a supporter. This is extraordinary. Here is a group of women who are extremely competent - they run a refugee camp in Pakistan and their own hospital. They run mobile health care, orphanages, primary and secondary schools, handicraft programs for widows and women who need assistance, small business projects and make all the decisions. And men follow.

Where else does this happen? They also work with prostitutes. Many women are forced into prostitution because of a husband being killed. In Afghanistan this is ostracized: anyone who is a prostitute is treated as a leper. Any who work with prostitutes are also treated as lepers, but they do it.

So this group of women are doing culturally revolutionary things: they make the decisions and they have male supporters. But they are not just working in community support areas. They are outspoken for women publicly and politically.

For example, their website: it a public statement. It has been fantastic in getting human rights abuses against women in the public eye.

They have conscientiously documented and photographed instances of abuse and put them into the public arena. They are well known, even though they are under cover.

They put out many political publications. They have their 'Payam-e-Zan' or Women's Message' magazine which is a very strong political analysis of what is happening and a clear statement of the direction they want for the future of Afghanistan.

They are very strongly outspoken against the Taliban and fundamentalist warlords who have been responsible for the enormous amount of violence against women and men.

They regularly organise political demonstrations in Pakistan, despite the risk. In Afghanistan it would be much too dangerous: a women's only organisation, a publicly outspoken one at that, is completely outrageous in a conservative environment like Afghanistan.

They don't use their own names - they don't even know the names of other members, for security reasons. If anyone is caught they can't give information about anyone else. They have no headquarters and no landline phone.

They have been extremely competent in adapting following what that happened to Meena. They had to find a different model to function, and this is how they have chosen to do it. Amazing!

Here, we are a bit shy about thinking of a group of women as a legitimate entity. We are a bit embarrassed that we are just women. We don't stand up with the confidence, for example, of a male football club and feel that what we say and what we do has validity.

In RAWA they don't find this is a problem at all. They have no problem in being an organization made up of women, and being quite strong about it.

This is why I find RAWA such an extraordinary organization that we can learn much from.

Mariam Rawi, the RAWA member who was here in Melbourne quite recently, gave the annual human rights oration of the Mornington Peninsular Shire.

The CEO was standing in front of the audience, introducing the opening address in a very neat, well-tailored suit, with bow tie and expensive glasses: obviously on a good salary. I am not meaning to knock him but he looked conspicuously different compared to Mariam.

She was standing beside him in borrowed clothes with her coat, a community coat from RAWA, her jeans from a secondhand shop and her second hand shoes really ready to be throw out, she told me. They were not holding together well because they were mice eaten.

What Mariam receives for her work is food and board: a very modest sum. Here is a woman who is a key figure in an organization of 2,000 members, 2,000 local supporters and an extensive international network of support and she gets close to nothing.

She works all night because she is a married woman with a child and night is the best time for her work, and the electricity stays on all night (if they are lucky) so the internet works best then.

During the day it doesn't function too well at all. They work in the night but when things are functioning, in the day as well . The amount of time she works and the amount of effort she puts in, like all RAWA members it seems, is extraordinary.

The work she does has a major effect on many, many women who are in extreme, often life and death, situations.

I was acutely aware of the stark contrast as to how we value lives and how we value work from one side of the globe to the other: where you are located, counts. Someone in Afghanistan, particularly a woman, is not given the same value in spite of her amazing efforts.

It is really quite moving when you think about it. I gave Mariam her Australian tour timetable and asked if it was too much, but she said "Whatever you give me, I will do". For a whole month she worked 'full speed ahead' with never a request for a breathing space.

Her passion and commitment left me spellbound. Actually her audiences were spellbound, too. After the presentation at Toorak College, from just one person who heard her speak, a cheque for $10,000 was put into the RAWA account.

Talking about her experiences, the commitment of RAWA and the future they want for women and Afghanistan, just knocked people out of their socks. They really are quite extraordinary women.

People really wanted to get behind what they are doing at RAWA and to be supportive. They could see the great significance of these women's work. And this is what I am hopeful will happen here in Australia as well: that we will have a rejuvenation of women actively following women's wisdom (you can call it that), looking for new directions and building new social alternatives rather than trying to change the male paradigm. That doesn't work .

And we can do better than a mould an ocean of Margaret Thatchers. I think we can learn a lot from RAWA - that women have the capacity; that we can take a different direction which is outside the male model; that we should have the confidence in what we are and who we are; that we matter and that we should be taken notice of. RAWA has arisen out of adversity and whether this always has to be the case to stimulate new thought and action, I don't know.

Perhaps the more comfortable we are, the less likely we are to create something as effective and 'revolutionary' as RAWA, but hopefully we can learn from it.

RAWA strongly acknowledges its herstory, and Meena and her contribution are a constant part of RAWA's present. It concerns me that the tradition that we have as women here and the herstory we have as women is not something that is constantly part of us or passed on or remembered continually.

The male tradition never dies. For example, every Saturday in winter you hear the history of every football club, who kicked what, when, etc. There is non-stop reinforcement of the traditions of the male paradigm. Amongst women, we don't have this.

Even with the Union of Australian Women and all the fantastic work they have done, there is not a stream of young women who are part of the same process - picking up the work and going on with it. We tend to go ahead in fits and starts.

The Women's Festival that Sue (Leigh) and I started in 2002 was to try to address that to some extent, to get a big celebration on International Women's Day (IWD) going, which would make women feel that a large and public festival by and for women is appropriate. We really do need to celebrate women and feel positive about who we are - that we are quite justified in having a large space on the globe, as women.

The 'One Day of the Year' for us should be IWD: a large festival, equal to the International Comedy Festival or bigger. All the festivals we have in Melbourne have got larger, year by year.

But on International Women's Day there aren't banners hanging from Flinders Street Railway Station and all down Swanston Street, letting everyone know it is International Women's Day. We have to scratch around on the internet to try and find something, anything, that is happening. I find this distressing.

Also, it is important that women of all cultures should be involved in IWD. And all ages should be together so we don't have broken ties with what has gone before: Everyone should be part of women's organisations. Older people can then learn from younger people, and younger from older, and we can all put our two bob's worth in and we can all benefit together. That is really important.

It really struck me just how disjointed even our recent path has become when I attended a Reclaim the Night collective meeting some time ago and one young woman read out the collective's statement. It said something to the effect of: "For Reclaim the Night this year, this is our statement: women will be liberated through the liberation of working class men". She then proceeded to explain the herstory of feminism since about the nineteen sixties which really didn't seem to match my memory of things or recorded events.

I found myself saying "I don't think that is quite right" but she knew differently. And this is only over one generation: she was of an age where she could have been my daughter. I was troubled by her understanding of Reclaim the Night.

Another thing that is imperative to bring about change for women and the community as a whole is for males to be actively campaigning to change male attitudes and behaviour.

The feminism we now have, which puts the onus on women to make demands that women have rights and expect to be treated accordingly, is not enough. Men have been given this information for decades but information about the rights of women doesn't change the male belief system and men acting as agents of this system.

Footballers have regularly had allegations of pack rape made against them with the sexual violation of women part of their bonding process. Males prostituting women is still seen as 'civilised' behaviour for men.

The 'flesh trade' is on the rise, not fall, and the sexual trafficking of women, to 'service' men is an ever expanding, global pandemic of abuse.

There was some research done by Angela Taft recently looking at 18 to 20 year old Australian women and a quarter of them said they had experienced domestic violence and half of this was with an intimate partner.

Despite feminism, male behaviour hasn't changed too much. It is interesting too that abusive male behaviour here has become more cunning, so acting violently against a women without thought, has been replaced by acting in a sneaky, premeditated way.

There is a significant increase, for example, in men who are spiking drinks before sexually assaulting and raping women. They know this behaviour is not appropriate, but they are still doing it - in a calculated way, even worse than just acting from a knee jerk reaction.

The Australian Institute of Criminology 's recent study found 60% of spiking related sexual assaults happened in the home by someone known. It has to take males actually out there, on their soap box, (as feminists did in the seventies) demanding that males change their behaviour, if women's circumstances are to change.

Then you have ridiculous comments like those from John Howard, the prime minister, and Mark Latham, stating we need more male teachers in schools because boys aren't getting the male message. They need male role models.

In a football team, where could you find more males being supportive or bonding, providing more male role models in the one spot than anywhere else? And what behaviour do they encourage? - violence against women and misogyny.

It doesn't work that having 'x' more males in a male's life means that a boy is automatically going to become a better human being.

Going back to RAWA, they have been running their schools with an innovative education policy of tolerance and respect for everybody with much success. Boys who have been coming through their schools have been educated to have a different understanding of gender relations with a much more respectful attitude towards women and girls than those who have been reared in the misogynist and fundamentalist madrases of the Taliban, training orphaned boys.

It is not what gender does the educating that matters. With RAWA it is the implementation of a different system of education which has changed their boys' outlook for the better, and this translates into a better future for the whole community.

We need RAWA schools and RAWA's initiative, women's initiative, for everybody's benefit - males and females.